Thursday, April 27

[2k=0] Begging on the Internet for a Return to Earth

Been trying to raise money to get a down payment on
this plot of land next to us that came available due to the old neighbor wizard
dude passing on to the next phase of existence, and it’s been difficult. It
hasn’t really been complicated, as it breaks down to we (Bird Tribe) have no
economic value, have no economic equity, and raw land is not seen as a good
investment for banks unless the motherfucker buying it is chopping it up and
putting up some houses. The American way of civilization is really frustrating
because you work really hard to look in the mirror and not feel shame, you try
to untangle the mess of psychological tangles from the years you know plus the
ones before that come in with ancestral weights, but then you want to do some
seemingly simple shit like add a little sliver of 10 acres of rural wasteland
to your already 4.5 acres of rural wasteland cultured into sanctuary against
devilish world at large, and the devil mathematicians open up their master
spreadsheets which you only have permission to view a limited version of a
couple times a year, and they say, “I’m sorry, your columns are not wide
enough.”

So we’ve been doing a crowdfunding campaign {link to the Owlcraft/Rojonekku Sanctuary gofundme}, which
I have to admit is one of the most demoralizing things you can do, especially
when you understand what a fucking struggle it is to maintain nose above water,
constantly hustling against rising tide of the last dying gasps of the U.S.
Empire. One always hopes in these situations that there are these amazing
wealthy benefactors you don’t know about who just happenstance across your tale
of wishing (and let’s be honest, digital begging) and throw a mass amount of
pittance in their spreadsheet columns which is life-altering to you. But it
doesn’t happen that way. You are hitting up, virally, the people you already
know, most of whom are in the exact same situations you are in. In this system
of haves and have-nots, the majority – although divided and conquered – are actually
those who have-not to the extent they can be comfortable. (Queue up one of
those New Poor thinkpieces about “How the Majority of Americans Cannot Afford a
$400 Car Repair!”) The campaign has had a couple of spikes, and a couple of
lengthy ebbs, mostly because it requires me to be proactive and confident and
act as salesman for our crowdfunding campaign, which is about as opposite my
personality as possible.

But I try. And I hit moments where I convince
myself I have to do it, because otherwise we have no ability to purchase the
land, and some asshole fake country motherfucker will buy the 10 acre plot and
divide it into five 2-acre parcels, and put up a patch of shitty pre-fab houses
that are gonna fall apart in two decades time, to manipulate their own
spreadsheets to get a few suckers still believing in the American dream to
imagine they’ve moved out to the country, by literally fucking up the rural
nature already in place. Yesterday when I rode home from work, I could actually
feel that energy in the air – I think it was the warmth. The devils cower from
the rain and cold, but once spring comes and the plants start to supernaturally
grow wild again, they start to have their devil visions about order and
gridlock and the ironically worded “freshly mown” grass and neat littles houses
that look alike, perfectly unblemished in their manufactured newness, and they
start plotting. I could feel their devil maths being applied to the physical
spaces yesterday, for some reason.

The problem is, I know the hustle/struggle too
well, and when I start to hype up the crowdfunding shit, someone who I know is
hustling/struggling just as hard maybe worse than me will drop $15 or $20 or
even $50 on it. And that makes me feel guilty as fuck. It’s not like I’m trying
to pay for cancer treatments or help feral children escape psychiatric center confinement
and be allowed to return to the wolves or something entirely obviously
beneficial and necessary like that. We’re trying to buy some land to re-unify
it with land we already have, none of which we actually own (because A: you can’t
own Earth, and B: even if you pretend Earth can be owned, we will owe banks
payments for the land we claim to own as well as taxes and anywhere along the
next two decades should we be unable to cover those obligations we’ll be just
like the old couple next door, again, all over). I don’t want friends who are
in the same demographic of retail lower middle class poverty, sitting at a desk
(if we’re lucky) where the American dream has long since died, hoping to I don’t
know, none of us know, we’re just continuing to do it because if we don’t keep
doing it, we’re fucked. I mean, we’re all sort of fucked to some extent already,
because we really are one cataclysmic event away from it all coming undone –
one unexpected hospital trip, or car wreck, or horribly placed fallen tree limb
from the whole thing we’re barely holding together falling apart entirely, with
little to no safety net to catch us. It’s fucking scary. AND THAT IS MOST
PEOPLE’S REALITY!

Thus, crowdfunding in that light feels like some
stupid shit. Ultimately, I wish the entire system would fall apart (which it
is) because it’s unsustainable, and mostly immoral (apply whatever morality you
want to – American capitalism as it has come to be in the 21st Century will not
be kosher). I justify that by expanding what we’re doing at our Bird Tribe
Compound to include the surrounding land (some of which I may or may have not
already had some path-making go across), we are working towards fighting that
prevailing devil math mentality. And there’s truth to that – that land has
certainly helped heal me. (I’m still fucked, for what it’s worth.) But the
notion we just buy our way into making shit better simultaneously implies the
system in place is wrong, but we can fix it by working within the system in
place. I’m not sure I philosophically believe that, which is why ultimately I
have a hard time continually pounding the LOOK AT MY GOFUNDME LOOK AT MY
GOFUNDME LOOK AT MY GOFUNDME digital drums enough to achieve success before the
devils swoop in and fuck everything up for me.

I also feel conflicted because my life is pretty
fucking good to be honest. Things have been going well in ways I’m afraid to
enumerate because previous life experience has taught me to expect the worst to
blindside me just as things start going good. This again is a facet fraud
syndrome where as natural born have-not, you are accustomed to have-not
struggles. But once you start to have a couple of lucky breaks (believe me, the
meritocracy is a myth, so even if you are succeeding in life, it is because you
are making the most of some lucky breaks, nothing more than that) going your
way, you expect have-not balance to be maintained, and something to come along
and crush the sand castle fantasies of finally-done-come-uppance built upon
parlaying a couple lucky breaks into a few more lucky breaks. The parlaying metaphor
is apt, because The House (the system) always wins. If you come up, somebody
else fell down. If you really come up, and got that millionaire money, a whole
slew of somebody elses fell down.

Thus, I am left feeling conflicted. The only thing
that helps me feel better is getting lost in the woods (where I’m the least
lost feeling), modeling language play (poetry) after the crows’ leadership, and
just trying to heal.

There is a somewhat common capitalist carney trick
of encouraging others to “give back” from where you come from, so that if you
do become economically blessed through lucky breaks, you can help others
(conceivably) by donating wealth to organizations or groups that work with
people fucked by the system in ways you may have originally related to. This
act of charity, although certainly not immoral at all (again, apply whatever
morality system you use in real life, and charity is generally okay) does not
necessarily absolve one of complicity in the entirely fucked system they now
benefit from, but it launders our guilt away enough to go on with making that
money. (The entire realm of crowdfunding I am speaking about here depends on
this psychological aspect to the guilt of having to some level while others
have-not to larger, or – to be more descriptively – lesser levels.)

And yet oddly it is not the money that heals
broken people, ever. It is the space to heal, the found or built or cultivated
or forged communally Sanctuary, that allows the broken to mosaic back together
a relatively beautiful existence from the fractured beginnings. For my ol’ lady
and me, this has been what we’ve tried to cultivate and culture on this land.
We’ve both done it elsewhere as well, and we both believe more than anything
that despite hoping to get proper credit for what you’ve created through your
work, nobody can own that type of work. It’s a shared effort, ideally, where
everyone works to help each other find enough Sanctuary to make their lives
less fucked, not more fucked.

Where we live was traditionally (pre-Columbian) part
of Monacan tribal lands. The indigenous civilizations tended towards a more communal
bent, and in fact that’s where the American notion of democracy was co-opted
from. I’ve been skimming around this book An Anthropology of Marxism by Cedric
Robinson, and it’s gotten me thinking on how our definition of Western
Civilization is still centered on European origins, which overlooks the
differing perspective on what civilization should be which already existed in
the western hemisphere. But even defining that as pre-Western Civilization is
kinda stupid because there’s no fucking wall in the Pacific Ocean that all of a
sudden you’re east again. There is the International Date Line, which has you
fall back a day, because when the devils applied their grid to the entire
Earth, it had to loop back somewhere, being the Earth is not flat but whole,
but that date line is not a real physical thing you see.

The Earth is everything here – all that we regard
as nature, including the land, as well as man. I guess I don’t really at my
heart level believe in the Man vs. Nature metaphor which seems to be common in
what we label “Western Civilization”, and has been used as the basis to claim
dominion over nature, whether by religion or science, throughout Western
Civilization’s domination over history. My brain is trained to believe this
shit (much like the meritocracy myth and the American exceptionalism one too)
but my heart knows better.

This is why asking for money to buy some land is
so hard – my heart’s not into it. My heart knows struggle and lack of Sanctuary
all too fucking well. My brain says I have to do it, to try and combat devil
math being applied too close to the little isthmus of not-safety-netted
Sanctuary we’ve already put the work into creating. But man, my heart knows
this whole system is bullshit. My heart wants something better, not just for
me, not just for the 10 acres next to where I owe money to a bank for the next
20 years over, not just for whatever my current tribe happens to be, but for
the whole fucking lot of us. I don’t know how that would happen though. Got no
idea. I try to do the hard work at untangling myself and those close to me, and
that work takes up any time I have, while maintaining position in the
exceptional labyrinth of laundered dreams that has me sitting at a desk all
day, to keep up payments on what I’ve “achieved” so that those with full access
to the master spreadsheets don’t repossess it all because I let my columns
lapse too far into red. And that’s everybody I know’s fucking reality – barely holding
on.

starting points

What It Do

Low art formed in low places by a real dude. Bread words on the bedazzling bedeviled internet machines. For flesh and blood contact, or exchanges of treasure or tribute): RAVEN MACK PO BOX 270 SCOTTSVILLE, VA 24590. For 1s and 0s robot contact (or exchanges of virus and vinegraic piss): ravenmack at gmail dot com. Paypal support can be thrown at that email address too if you got it like that.

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